


Affliction

by Teatrolley



Series: your hands around my neck [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Angst, Captivity, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, wow so serious this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 05:46:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5697274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teatrolley/pseuds/Teatrolley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What are you thinking about?” Bond asks later, when they’ve been silent for a while.<br/>“How long it would take me to bleed out if I slit the artery in my upper thigh open,” Q says. It isn’t true; he was thinking about this cartoon he saw once about a squirrel and his best human friend, but he knows the other sentence will make Bond smile. Bond does; morbid.</p><p>_________________</p><p>Bond goes rogue on a mission, and Q goes to find him. Only someone else finds Q first. And that's only the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Affliction

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so. This fandom is used to dark and messed-up things, so this might not be out of the ordinary. Still, I feel like I should warn and comment that all of the thoughts in this are obviously very unhealthy, and that this is not a romantic or healthy way to start a relationship. Also, fair warning: medical things might be inaccurate.
> 
> Basically I just wanted to explore the psychology of these characters in this situation. And me, who normally writes fluff. Branching out, I guess. 
> 
> Enjoy your reading!

He goes to Serbia because Bond goes rogue on another one of his missions, and he has made it his own personal agenda to get Bond back to his senses and back on the radar. Well, and M has, too. It’s sort of a collaborate decision. 

Bond is supposed to be in a rented flat in a shabby part of Belgrade, but Q never actually gets to see him. When his cab from the airport starts driving in the opposite direction of Q’s destination, and he protests, the driver pulls a gun on him. 

Q sits still in his seat, with the gun pressing against his temple, and knows that there’s no way he could remember his physical training enough to escape this situation.

“Oh,” he says. The gun is pressed into his skin harder.

__

The first three days he’s alone.

He is stripped bare and given a white T-shirt, a pair of grey sweats, some black pants, and two black socks. The clothes are clean and fresh-smelling. Q reckons he’ll probably be left with them for a while, so starts out not wearing the pants or the tee, thinking he’ll be able to save them that way; make them last longer. 

But at night, it gets cold; freezing, actually. His resolve breaks already on the second day, and he wears the T-shirt, lying on both of the room’s mattresses under both of the blankets, and tries to subdue his shivers. 

The lights are on inside of said room every twelve hours for the same amount of time, in what is probably meant to be a simulation of the rhythm of the day. He gets to know it intimately, the room, within his first two hours of light. 

It’s 2 and a half times 3 meters, seven and a half square meters in total. The walls are grey and, Q thinks, made of cement. There’s not a gap between the floor and the walls, and none between the walls and the ceiling either. No windows, but the door has a hatch through which Q is given food three times a day.

Q gets tired of the room within four hours. He’s explored every inch of it; he’s made sure that there’s no possible room to hide anything. There are no possible routes of escape.

On the fourth day, the door to the room opens for the first time, and Bond is thrown into it. 

His mouth is bloody, and his jaw is bruised, like he’s been hit across it with a fist. He’s naked, but has what looks like the equivalent of Q’s attire in his hands. When he sees Q, sitting cross-legged on the mattresses, his face falls; Q isn’t in a position to know why. 

“Well,” he says, instead. “I’m sure this will be fun.”

Bond twitches, like Q had touched him against his knowledge and shocked him, and grimaces. Q keeps looking when Bond spreads the clothes out on the floor to look at it, and ends up with nothing to cover him or his groin. Q is already exhausted and bored out of his mind, and looking at Bond’s naked body is a distraction. 

“How long have you been in here?” Bond asks. 

He stands up, with the pants between his hands, but Q just keeps looking at him. God, all of that muscle and skin; Q imagines letting himself sink into it, buried against it. Bond’s pubic hair is dark blonde and tightly curled. If this had happened just four days previously, Q would’ve been flustered and blushing, feverously wanting, but even just this long in isolation has beaten all of that out of him. 

“This is my fourth day,” he says. “I don’t suppose you’ve managed to call in assistance since you broke the radio I gave you for this very purpose?” 

When he looks up and meets Bond’s eyes, Bond is watching him intensely. Q raises a brow at him in question.

“No,” Bond says, but moves on quickly: “Are you all right?” He still hasn’t put his clothes on, the fabric hanging from his fingers. 

Q shrugs. “Fine,” he says. “Why?”

Now it is Bond’s turn to look down his own body, in a gesture signalling to Q what he means.

“You’re not usually this unashamed,” he says. Q leans back against the wall behind him, and stretches out his legs in front of him; getting comfortable. 

“Bored,” he says. His eyes fall to Bond’s bullet-wound scar at his shoulder from when Moneypenny shot him. Bond puts on the pants. 

“Have you seen anyone?” he asks. Q watches as he puts on the sweats as well. They cling to his thighs, a little too small over the muscle. 

“Only the driver.”

“White?” Bond asks. “Dark hair? Nose that looks like it’s been broken several times?”

“That’s him,” Q says. 

It’s too bad, because it means that they are without much clue as to who is doing this to them. No one has talked to Q yet, which is strange, because he’d think that this was about getting information. Perhaps this is really about Bond; one of his personal feuds. 

Still, that Bond is here with him might turn out to be in his favour. MI6 are tracking him more intensely than they are tracking Q, because of his history of going rogue, and he is physically a lot more capable than Q. Perhaps, with Q’s intelligence and Bond’s muscle, they can craft an escape plan that will work. 

As he thinks all of this, Bond puts the last of his clothing on. 

He comes over to Q then, and starts pressing his hands into Q’s body. It doesn’t take long for Q to figure out that Bond is checking if he’s been hurt. He should mind, probably, that Bond doesn’t just ask him, but really, when it means that he has hands on him and something to pull him out of his own brain, he doesn’t entirely mind. 

“I’m fine,” he says, when Bond has eventually checked all of him. Bond’s hand stays on his shoulder, and Q doesn’t mind that either. “I’m not hurt.”

When he says it, Bond twitches as if he’s recoiling from an angry hand. His shoulders tense up, and his face gets all tight. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. Q doesn’t know what that means. 

That is, until Bond is fetched.

__

They’ve been in the room together for two days when, during one of the dark periods, the door is opened and the man who drove them both here appears, and pulls Bond with him. At first Bond fights to escape his grip, but then the man says, “Come along or I’ll take the other one first,” and Bond goes willingly. 

It isn’t until Q hears Bond yelling in agony that he realises what’s happening. As he listens to Bond’s pain, the fear starts boiling in his blood, reaching to the tip of his fingers and down to his toes, and his throat closes in on itself, so he almost can’t breathe. He only discovers that he’s shaking when he raises his hands to press them against his ears, keeping out the sound.

When, after what feels like hours, Bond comes back, his mouth is bleeding again, and the skin around his right eye and on his throat is red with irritation and will probably start bruising soon. His arm hangs down in an angle so distorted and wrong, that Q thinks his shoulder is probably dislocated, but the thing that really makes the bile rise in his throat is Bond’s broken index finger; it’s already swollen and Q swears he can see the bone almost poking through Bond’s skin.

“I’m sorry,” Bond says again, like this is somehow his fault. It makes Q come back to his senses, and he raises himself on his knees and beckons Bond over to their mattresses laid out next to each other. 

“Your shoulder,” Q says. Bond sits on his own knees on the mattress next to Q’s. 

“I need you to push it back in place,” Bond says. Q nods, and fights against the urge to vomit; he has to be strong, now. 

Letting Bond guide him, he puts his hands around Bond’s shoulder. He fights against his dizziness to hear what Bond is telling him, and does it, like requested, in one quick movement. 

Bond bites his lower lip so hard it bleeds, but a whimper of pain still escapes. Q knows that Bond is trying to be silent for him, and is simultaneously angry and grateful.

“What do they want?” he asks. It’s an attempt to change the subject from the bruises. 

“State secrets, of course,” Bond says. He starts ripping off a piece of his own T-shirt, but winces when it hurts his finger. Q does it for him. 

“Of course,” he says. 

He holds the piece of fabric up to Bond’s broken finger in question, and tries not to shiver when Bond nods, and he knows that he’ll have to bandage it, so the bone will grow back together evenly. 

“I’m sorry,” Bond says again. 

“Stop saying that.” Q is angry, but mostly because being angry is the easiest right now. “Is it you specifically they hate?” Bond shakes his head. 

“No,” Q says. “Then shut up.”

Bond smiles as if he finds Q _sweet_ and it makes Q so furious that he binds the finger right there and then, and doesn’t care when Bond’s smile becomes an expression of pain instead.

“Why did they start with you?” he asks, afterwards. He leans away from Bond and back against the wall behind him. “I’m far more likely to tell. And more valuable, too.”

“They wanted to scare you,” Bond says. 

“Oh.”

Bond joins Q against the wall. “Are you scared?” he asks. Neither of them are looking at the other. 

“Yes,” Q says; he is. 

__

They take Bond two more times, before it is Q’s turn. 

He thinks he’s prepared. He thinks he’d resist anything to keep MI6’s secrets safe. He thinks he knows what pain is.

He’s wrong. As they break his lowest rib and draws a pattern of scars on his thigh, before they break his jaw too, Q realises that he knew nothing about what pain is. He knew nothing about fear. Not until now. 

__

At first it feels like the pain is limited to whenever they are taken away, but Q quickly realises that the things that are being inflicted on him are things that don’t just go away. He lies on his mattress with his broken rib, and feels like a thousand small knives are being pushed into his chest whenever he tries to breathe. 

The psychological torture doesn’t start until what is probably about two weeks in, if Q still has any correct sense of time. One day the overhead lights are turned on, like they usually are every twelve hours, but this time they aren’t turned off again. 

Q hides his face against the wall, and curls up into a ball as much as possible, in an attempt to escape it. He feels like he might be going insane, as Waterloo by ABBA plays in his mind on repeat. He feels taut, like a tightly strung line; like the simplest of touches could break him and make him break down. 

Bond does touch him then, just a single brush of a hand pressed lightly to Q’s shoulder-blade from behind, and Q feels his entire body convulsing with a shiver, before he starts shaking violently. 

Bond keeps touching him. A hand running lightly down Q’s upper arm, a nose nuzzled into the fine hairs at the nape of his neck, lips pressed softly to the dip where Q’s shoulder meets his neck. 

Q turns to his back, and only realises that tears are running from his eyes when they reach his ears and Bond’s finger comes up to dry them off. He keeps his eyes closed, as Bond’s hands keep running lightly over his chest, careful not to press too hard and cause any pain.

“All right?” Bond asks. 

Q nods; he can’t speak right now, but it’s more than fine. He’s gone so long now, associating every touch with pain, not feeling a soft or affectionate one, that the sensation of it is enough to make him break. 

“You should teach me about coding,” Bond says, then. 

“What?”

“Not the parts of it that these people want to know, obviously,” Bond says. “The basics. So we have something to do.”

Q doesn’t know if he could even be able to teach something in this state, and especially not to Bond, who knows only the bare minimum required of an agent about technology. Bond is right though; it’s a good idea. It might even keep the madness lingering at the edges of Q’s mind at bay. 

“Okay,” he says. “Yeah.” 

He doesn’t start talking immediately, and Bond keeps touching his face, running a finger over Q’s nose and eyebrows and lips and ears. It calms him, as his mind is brimming with all of the knowledge he had almost forgotten he has in the midst of all of his pain. The insides of his eyelids are painted with letters and numbers, and for the first time in what feels like forever, he isn’t conscious of the pain in his chest. 

He must have fallen asleep, despite of the light, because when he wakes up it’s still on. Bond is gone. 

Q solves puzzles in his head until Bond comes back, now with a broken rib too and a few more cuts down his back, and then he starts teaching Bond about the code. It’s something to do. 

__

A month in total passes, and Q starts pondering the possibility that they will never be found and rescued. He stops dreaming about what he will do once he gets out.  
__

It takes one and a half months of this hell, and Q starting to forget things, knowledge, he would have so easily known back in his normal life, before he starts thinking about dying.

It’s not until a particularly bad day however, where the light, after having been on for two weeks, suddenly go out and they are plunged into darkness, and Q starts crying with the simple relief of it, that he asks Bond to kill him. 

It’s just that he’s so tired. His mattress and blanket and clothes are all dirty, and his hair and skin is covered with filth and blood and dried, caked sweat. So many of his fingers are broken and swollen, and he hasn’t taken a breath without being in pain since week two. His head hurts constantly, feeling like it’s about to explode with it, and he’s cold into the very insides of his bones.

“I can’t,” he says. His voice is shaky with his tears. Bond, lying on the mattress next to him, turns his head to watch him. His clothes are filthy too, and his trousers, once so tight on him, now hangs loosely from his body.

“I can’t fight them anymore.” Q hiccups with a sob, and it aches in his chest. He just wants this pain to end.

“You have to,” Bond says. 

Q shakes his head, tears rolling down it and into his ears. It hurts, just like everything else. He feels Bond scooting in closer before he feels Bond’s bandaged, callused hand pressed gently to his cheek. The softness of the touch, and Bond not wanting him to die, makes him sob again.

“I can’t,” he repeats. “I just want it to stop. I’m going to give in.”

“They’ll come for us,” Bond says. His tone has a slight edge of desperation to it. “Find us. They always do.”

“I always do,” Q corrects him. “But I’m not there now, am I?”

His eyes are closed, but he feels it when Bond’s head comes up to rest on Q’s shoulder, allowing his nose to press into Q’s cheekbone. He sniffs, but Q doesn’t think he’s able to smell anything. Q hasn’t had a sense of smell for weeks. But Bond just keeps breathing him in, his lips occasionally brushing gently against Q’s skin.

Their faces are so very close. God, Q just wants to be held, but in a warm bed and free from pain. He wants, almost more than that, to be kissed one last time.

He turns his head, and barely has to move before his and Bond’s lips meet; they are so perfectly aligned. He presses, just a tiny bit, and feels that he has Bond’s upper lip between his own. Bond presses back against him, just enough to be felt. 

It hurts too much to keep his face turned like this, so Q turns back. Bond’s lips press softly into his jaw instead. It reawakens the tears in Q’s eyes, and they continue falling. 

“Kill me,” he says. He begs it, really. He never imagined he’d sink to a level like this.

“No,” Bond says. His tone is firm, controlled. Without surprise, too. He’d probably expected this. Q hates him for it. 

“I’m going to betray MI6,” he begs. “Betray England. You have to.”

“No,” Bond repeats. He never once stops touching Q’s cheek softly with his hand.

Q wants to hit him, he’s so angry; he wants to punch Bond himself, make him lose consciousness, and break his jaw to steal his tooth with the cyanide pill. He wants to do anything to escape this hell. But he can’t, because even that would hurt too much. He can’t move. 

He turns and buries his head in Bond’s chest instead, and cries and cries with heaving sobs, whimpering at the pain in-between. He’s pathetic. He’s pitiful. 

Bond runs a hand over his hair through it all, and kisses his forehead, and Q falls asleep to it, somehow, after hours and hours.

__

It’s the last time he cries.

__

The next time he's picked up, he simply closes his eyes and tries to shut everything off. When they ask him about MI6 security, about code, about Bond, he keeps his eyes closed and his mouth shut. That is, until it opens with his screaming. 

"You didn't tell," Bond says, when he's thrown back into the cell. He catches him before he stumbles and falls, and leads him carefully over to the mattress. Q ignores him, and imagines all the ways you could take a life instead.

__

After another week passes, and Q is still alive, Bond crawls up to him in the darkness, and suddenly his fingers are wrapped around Q’s neck. Immediately Q’s pulse jumps and becomes frantic, but Bond just keeps touching him softly, and presses fingers into Q’s pulse-point. They’re wet, probably with blood, but Q doesn’t care. 

“Have you changed your mind?” he asks. He’s referring to the possibility of death. Bond squeezes his fingers just a little around Q’s neck, but now Q is ready for it, so he remains still under it. 

“No,” Bond says. Q isn’t surprised. “It’s a kink.”

“What is?” Q asks. It doesn’t feel like a change of subject, because this is so very intimate, Bond’s hands around him, that he isn’t surprised some people might get off on it.

“Erotic asphyxiation,” Bond says. “It’s supposed to give you a high. The lack of oxygen.”

When Bond squeezes his fingers again, as if testing out the waters, Q throws his head back to give him better access. His heart is still beating faster than it probably should in his state, but his entire body feels warm, too; it’s exhilarating.

“ _Your_ kink?” he asks.

“No,” Bond says. “Definitely not my kink. I’ve killed too many people to find the ability to do it exciting.”

Q puts his hands up to rest them against Bond’s. _He_ finds this exciting, but not because it’s a game of trusting Bond not to go all the way. Because there’s a distinct possibility that he just might go all the way, by accident. 

“It might be my kink,” he says. There’s a sound of breath exhaled, like in something that could have been a laugh once upon a time, before all of this. 

“No,” Bond says. “You just want me to kill you.” He is good, Bond is.

“Yes,” Q agrees. “You’re right.”

Bond’s hands tighten around him then, but not enough to cut out all of the air-supply. Maybe he’s trying to gauge whether or not Q would actually like it. Q thinks he would. 

“I’m not going to,” Bond says. He slackens his grip a bit, so Q can talk. “Kill you, that is. But the high might give you some relief.”

“Do it,” Q says. “I want you to.”

Before he does anything, Bond moves in closer, and Q feels a kiss being pressed to his neck, then another one. He moves down to press his lips to Q’s collarbone. It is marvellous really, how it hasn’t been broke yet. Q knows just how breakable it probably is.

“Blink quickly if you want me to stop. Otherwise I’ll keep going, even if you spasm.”

Q nods. “Yes,” he says. 

Bond tightens his grip again, and this time it’s hard enough for Q’s air-supply to be cut off. He barely twitches, but he feels it almost immediately, the way his brain goes into overdrive and panic, screaming for him to take in a breath and get some air. He looks into Bond’s swimming-pool-blue eyes instead, and focuses on Bond’s fingers, strong enough to take a life. He doesn’t want to fight against it.

He feels it, the moment his body switches from panic-mode to the one of exhilaration. It must relax his muscles, or Q’s expression must change, because Bond’s hands leave him immediately after. 

“How does it feel?” Bond asks. He kisses Q’s neck again.

It feels fucking marvellous, Q thinks. His head feels light, for once, and it feels like he’s floating instead of being tied down to his dirty mattress in this dirty room. His pain is just a vague sensation in contained spots of his body, instead of the all-encompassing ache and throbbing it has been for months. 

“Good,” he says. His voice is barely there, and croaky, but he powers through: “Brilliant.”

Bond smiles, just a tiny bit, and Q pulls him in to kiss him. He kisses him and kisses him, and they both probably taste rotten and feel like sandpaper, but Q doesn’t care, he can’t feel it, because he is giddy and high and has Bond’s lips on his own. 

“You’re not really in your right mind to consent to this,” Bond pulls back to say. 

He’s leaned over Q in an awkward angle, and Q vaguely registers the tightness in Bond’s expression as pain; probably from his broken rib poking in new places with the way he’s turned. 

“Lie down, you’re hurting,” he says, and then, when Bond does: “I’m not in my right mind at all, Bond.”

They lie side by side, but Bond’s hand comes up with the back of it turned towards Q’s chest, and rests there carefully. Q touches the fingers on it. It’s been over seven hours since one of them – Bond, this time – was last gathered, so it can’t be too long now. 

“Call me James,” Bond says. Q closes his eyes, and thinks he might be able to sleep.

“No,” he says. Bond is silent, but when Q opens his eyes and turns his head to look, he’s smiling. 

__

The next time Q is gathered, he is positive they damage both one of his kidneys and his liver with their beatings and their knife.

The next time Bond is gathered, they break the rest of the fingers on his left hand as well as his right foot. Q sacrifices the rest of his T-shirt to bandage him up. The blood soaks through the white fabric anyway.

__

The light has been on for four days straight, and Q can’t remember enough code to teach it to Bond. He’s lost track of how long they’ve been here. Instead, Bond tells him a story about a child he knew at his first orphanage, and Q listens to the hum of his voice more than his words. 

“What are you thinking about?” Bond asks later, when they’ve been silent for a while. 

“How long it would take me to bleed out if I slit the artery in my upper thigh open,” Q says. It isn’t true; he was thinking about this cartoon he saw once about a squirrel and his best human friend, but he knows the other sentence will make Bond smile. Bond does; morbid. 

“I’d like to take you out on a date once we get out of here,” he says. 

Q knows that Bond has lost hope that they’ll be found, now, too. That they’re a week or so away from committing suicide together. He knows exactly what Bond is doing, so he doesn’t say ‘We probably never will.’ 

He says, “A date? That’s awfully serious for you.”

Bond can’t touch him anymore, because his left hand and right shoulder are too messed up. Q thinks he probably would though, if he could.

“I might be awfully serious about you,” Bond says. 

Q is surprised to find that he's smiling. He'd forgotten what that was like. 

__

That’s before all the life finally leaves him. It does, and all that feels left of Q is his outer shell, beaten into submission so many times that Q hardly recognises it.

He stops thinking about dying. He was already there, and he couldn't. The next week all he thinks about is revenge. It's sweet daydreams of murdering his torturers slowly, and leaving them to bleed to death all on their own. 

As expected, only one and a half weeks more pass, before Bond turns to him and says, “So maybe I’m ready to leave this place, too.” 

They go to sleep together one last time, in each other’s arms. It hurts, but it doesn’t matter, because soon it will be over.

__

Q wakes up to darkness and the sound of guns being fired and lights illuminating the hallway outside of their door, visible only through the cracks around the hatch. He hears yelling and knows, deep in his bones, that they are saved.

When he turns his head to watch Bond, Bond is grinning at him, and it looks manic, but so must Q. Bond is dirty and bearded and long-haired, he’s skinnier than Q has ever seen him, skinnier than he’s ever been probably, but his eyes are glinting and, oh God, he will stay alive. 

“I should think dinner and a movie would be an acceptable date idea,” Q says. 

Bond takes his hand on the mattress between them, just as the door is opened, and men storm in with stretchers and medical equipment. Q closes his eyes and lets the relief wash over him; he is finally free.

**Author's Note:**

> And here you are. I've never written anything of this kind before, so you're very welcome to tell me how I did in the comments. It was a strange experience writing this, but I also felt like I learned some stuff.


End file.
